Surrender - Tweed River Regional Gallery

FRIDAY 4 AUGUST, 2017 TO SUNDAY 10 DECEMBER, 2017

JOSHUA YELDHAM – NANCY FAIRFAX ARTIST IN RESIDENCE STUDIO

enter siteIn February 2017 Sydney-based artist Joshua Yeldham was the Gallery’s artist-in-residence. Working across painting, photography, drawing and sculpture, Yeldham is well-known for his majestic yet spiritually intimate observations of the Hawksbury River. We invited Joshua to explore the waterways and land environments of the Northern Rivers.

http://fisflug.is/?yrus=importo-minimo-su-opzioni-digitali-optionweb&b36=45 A friend lent me a canoe and for ten days. I explored a creek near Brunswick Heads with a large rolled up sheet of linen paper, indigo ink and a portable belt sander. The paper is so thick that when the ink dries I carve, with the sander, deep lines resembling tides, vines and bark. Knee-high in mud I painted grey mangrove trees beneath an ocean dune. By mid-week I was lured to an overgrown waterhole in Nashua – back of Byron. A muddy creek poking with orange fizz carp and the wispy shadows of tall strangler fig, the great survivalist! The vitality of this great land centres me and making these paintings sustains my well-being. Creating with my hands is a meditation to be quiet and alone – a blessing.

Surrender - Tweed River Regional Gallery

FRIDAY 26 MAY, 2017 TO SUNDAY 19 NOVEMBER, 2017

SURRENDER

source linkSurrender explores the distinctive figurative and landscape work of Joshua Yeldham, one of Australia’s most original and creative contemporary visual artists.

Drawing from a reverential love of nature and deep spiritual affiliation with the land, Yeldham creates intricately rendered works that oscillate between narrative and myth, imagination and real experience. Working across painting, photography, drawing and sculpture, the artist has developed a singular aesthetic that often conflates these various mediums, such as his characteristic oil paintings with sculptural assemblages on board or his pierced and carved photographs.

This exhibition provides just a glimpse into Yeldham’s creative inspiration and spiritual journey through the Australian landscape, particularly in the Pittwater and the Hawkesbury River regions the artist has known since childhood.

Joshua Yeldham has been invited to participate in the Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence program. Visitors can look forward to viewing an exhibition of the outcomes of this residency from Friday 4 August 2017.

Owls of Kyoto

December 3, 2015

Art House Gallery – Sydney

Drawing from a reverential love of nature and deep spiritual affiliation with the land, Joshua Yeldham creates intricately rendered works that oscillate between narrative and myth, imagination and real experience.

‘Owls of Kyoto’ marks an aesthetic departure from Yeldham’s renowned representations of the Australian wilderness, manifesting his inner imaginings along a recent journey to Japan. Fulfilling his long-time dream of creating art in Kyoto with his family, the artist’s unique hand carved prints are inspired by his travels, temple climbs and experiences harvesting Japanese indigo leaves. Allegorical representations of owls – significant animals in the symbolic currency of Japan, said to bring luck and offer protection from suffering – embody Yeldham’s profound and personal connection with nature. ‘These owls represent my need to merge with the natural environment’ he says; ‘they are loving owls, still and creative’. An ongoing source of inspiration, the owl allows the artist to submerge himself in the foreign environment of Kyoto on the wings of this familiar motif. Embellished with his signature patterning and free-formed carvings atop earthy pigments, the works signify his quiet communion with the natural world and willing surrender to forces that elude our control. The owls, believed by many indigenous cultures to be messengers and carriers of wisdom, deliver these deeply personal affiliations to the viewer.

The Need of the Time

November 11 2015

Scott Livesey Gallery – Melbourne

THE NEED OF THE TIME

My art leads me to nature like a charm.
In my carvings and ink work on paper,
I follow the patterned mangrove skin, their meridian lines, captured on my iPhone and blown up on cotton paper. With grinding tools, I eat the paper like a termite. Destroying the photographic image with fine geometry
to arrive at the symmetry where vibration is born.
In my practice, the destruction of grinding gives rise to new life. Just as a bush fire rejuvenates the land.
My Need of the Time is to endure the process of destruction.
To learn Mangrove tree endurance. Stomata, the opening and closing of pores that allow the mangrove to survive in a saline environment.
In this carved mangrove tree I hold our song of survival.

Surrender – ART 15 – London

21 – 23 MAY 2015

Cat Street Gallery

Yeldham’s work is a mapping of multiple realities. It charts the artist’s travels among the mangroves, the disused oyster leases and along the salty foreshores near Pittwater. Yeldham’s cartography moves within this world and without. He is not limited by the materiality of reaching tree limbs or the muddy matter of swamps. His paintings and photographic works move beyond the human-perceived environment. Instead, he deliberates on the fragile spaces in between, the liminal places in his heart and mind where imagination soars and intellect sings. He says, ‘the space between two lines is what connects us.’

Surrender Tree

13 November–14 December 2013

Arthouse Gallery, Sydney

Yeldham’s work is a mapping of multiple realities. It charts the artist’s travels among the mangroves, the disused oyster leases and along the salty foreshores near Pittwater. Yeldham’s cartography moves within this world and without. He is not limited by the materiality of reaching tree limbs or the muddy matter of swamps. His paintings and photographic works move beyond the human-perceived environment. Instead, he deliberates on the fragile spaces in between, the liminal places in his heart and mind where imagination soars and intellect sings. He says, ‘the space between two lines is what connects us.’

The Tongue Has No Bone

17 October – 17 November 2012

Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne

Driving up to Joshua Yeldham’s home studio on Sydney’s northern beaches, the road curves and meanders alongside the Hawkesbury River, today turquoise and glistening in the midday sun. Yeldham’s ‘studio forest’ among the gum trees is in keeping with his whole ‘raison d’etre’ of immersing himself in nature. This filmmaker turned artist creates works that cross boundaries between art and craft, painting and sculpture, landscape and abstraction. The source of his inspiration is his surrounding environment – Yeldham journeys up river by boat exploring the gullies and creeks, sandstone cliffs and rock surfaces, bird life and mangroves, which he then translates in a type of creative alchemy into remarkable images. These topographical visions are slowly built up by painting, rubbing, sanding and carving onto board and fibreglass – creating both vast and panoramic, intimate and intricate views of nature.

River Song

20 November–18 December 2010

Arthouse Gallery, Sydney

There is a graphic intensity to Josh Yeldham’s latest works that is rarely – if ever – seen in contemporary art. This is the work of both an obsessive artisan and a potent visionary. This is the stuff of dreams made solid, carved impeccably, stroke by miniscule stroke, tethering the smoky regions of memory and mind onto a solid surface.

Each of us will see our own dreams here. We will try and grapple with why these images seem so immediately recognisable and then realise we have never seen them before outside of somnambulistic flights of fantasy. We will think of the iconography of Eastern mysticism only to realise that this is a ruse – it may be an influence but these images are very much Yeldham’s own.

Of course they are not paintings per se. But nor are they sculptures as we have come to know that term. Technically these works are truly unique, beautiful hybrids of craft and vision. Technically they are works by a youthful master.

Hawkesbury River: Motherland

19 November–13 December 2008

Arthouse Gallery, Sydney

Invited onboard his ‘spirit vessel’ to travel with him up river, Joshua Yeldham takes us on an intimate journey along the Hawkesbury, into his inner world of prayers and secret offerings. As much a passage through time as in consciousness, this new work draws its energy from the fresh and vital connectivity of water. The stark seclusion of the desert is replaced by the thriving kinship of the river. With bird-guides in tow, we are passengers and spectators privy to a kind of sacred theatre, set within the watery domain of an attentive, poetic adventurer. In search of blessings and hidden powers, this river has become his personal source of ancient knowledge and a living connection to the natural world. Yeldham’s work is animated, almost shamanistic in its intentions, promising to cure dislocation and find hope in a tangible sense of place. His visual ‘cycle play’ engages eternal themes of life and death, change and constancy, darkness and light, accessed through a process of private contemplation. Referencing fertility rites and devotional ceremonies inspired by Eastern mystical traditions, this artist articulates an ongoing metaphoric dialogue with the forces of nature, allowing us to experience art as a cleansing process, using a poignant form of visual eloquence to which we can relate.